Stan Sniff has been a disaster as Riverside County Sheriff. Even if you disregard the stories of corruption as they relate to individual employees under Stan Sniff’s regime, you can’t disregard the fact that Riverside County has less Jail Space PER CAPITA than LA, Orange, San Bernardino or San Diego Counties.
Stan Sniff complains about AB109, yet his solution to budget disagreements with the Riverside County Board of Supervisors is to leave parts of the inadequate jail space empty and un-staffed.
In 2014, a local patch lit Stan Sniff up. This is truly a rare feat in the Riverside Media as most are in the bag for Sniff or scared of him.
AB 109, also known as the Public Safety Realignment Act of 2011, was enacted as part of a broader strategy to reduce the state’s inmate population in the face of a federal court decree mandating that the number of inmates in California prisons be slashed by 33,000 for health and safety reasons.
Under AB 109, so-called “non-serious, non-violent” offenders convicted of felonies that do not stem from a sexual offense are to serve their sentences in local detention facilities. Proponents of realignment suggested that jail sentences would be capped at three years, but that has not held true; one inmate in Riverside County is serving a 12-year sentence, while another in Los Angeles County is serving 43 years at a local detention facility.
AB 109 also made counties responsible for prosecuting and incarcerating probation and parole violators whose offenses do not fall into the “serious or violent” category. According to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, nearly one-fifth of all jail detainees last year were AB 109 cases.
Stan Sniff did not do what other counties did. For example, my home County of Placer understood the obsession that the Leftists in Sacramento had with undermining three strikes, gutting criminal penalties and letting felons go free. Placer County built more jail space and hired more police in anticipation of Sacramento County not dealing with their problem. As a result, crime has only slightly increased in Placer.
In my home County of Placer, our Sheriff does not need to lie about Crime Statistics because save one extreme left wing supervisor, our county has been working in unison to deal with the decisions of state government. Stan Sniff did nothing to deal with the crisis created by the State of California. He did, however, claim Crime went down in Riverside County in 2018 – this claim has been roundly trashed by employees of the department. However, the only reporting was one gushing story from Sniff’s buddies in the Riverside Press-Enterprise quoting the doctored statistics put out by Sniff’s Information Minister.
According to the CEO’s office, in 2013, the sheriff released 9,286 inmates because of space limitations. That compares to what Sheriff Stan Sniff described as an unprecedented number in 2012 — 6,990.
I am sure thousands were released in the years 2014-current as well.
There are five detention facilities in the county able to hold just under 4,000 inmates — less than in any neighboring county.
As you will see, there are several things Stan Sniff has done to make the problem worse (beyond leaving Jail Space Empty)… to be continued.
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